Children suffer under political correctness

TOMORROW is Father's Day, although for one unhappy fellow in Sydney it is non-father's day.

This unfortunate man has been removed from his daughter's birth certificate. This triumph of legal misandry means that a child who is now 10 and, most important of all, knows he is the other half of her physical being for all of those 10 years, will just have to content herself with having a two-mothers' day.

What hope for fathers when even the cowardly politically correct media are now involved in this silly game of let's pretend, using the term having a baby "with" a person of the same sex, to describe the pregnancy of a partner of a government minister? Then again, the truth has always been a casualty of political correctness.

However, things are serious when even children become casualties. Children know that mother plus mother doesn't really equal child. It amounts to a form of psychological abuse to pretend otherwise.

That we are in this ludicrous situation is, of course, no accident. People who have an interest in pushing the homosexual marriage agenda are really only exploiting the fact of modern fractured families. Even the gay commentator Andrew Sullivan pointed this out when he remarked that the only reason that gays can try for marriage, using the spurious notion of marriage equality, is because normal heterosexual marriage is in such a parlous state.

Interestingly it is not just divorce that has caused this, and the catastrophic absent father problem that goes with it. The main reason for our lack of faith in the normal family structure is the wide acceptance of non-marriage with children. More than 30 per cent of Australian children are now born out of wedlock. The vast majority of these relationships, contrary to propaganda, are very unstable.

According to the Household Income Labour Dynamics in Australia survey, the odds of a de facto couple with children breaking up were between four and seven times higher than a couple who were married; and those children are the ones who are most at risk of abuse. Why? Because in general there is no resident father. Statistically, it is not the father who is the No 1 abuser of children -- it is the mother, then it is the partner of the mother. The father is the least likely to abuse his children.

The absent father syndrome parallels a decline in marriage. The non-marriage syndrome leads to the multiple-partner syndrome. Fickle young men, who father children by many women and go AWOL, is a common story in all post-industrial societies; in fact it has been blamed for the London riots. It is true, but it has been encouraged by the institutionalised bias against fathers in society and within the courts. Think of the common misconception about fathers.

Even the word patriarch has been given a nasty spin. Apparently it is no longer something to be proud of. The common feminised view of patriarchal fathers is that they are overbearing, remote and, above all, violent, and this violence might be subtle and coercive. If you think I exaggerate, have a look at the broad new provisions for claiming abuse and violence under the new Family Law Act, which institutes a new notion of subtle emotional and economic abuse. It also makes shared parenting orders more difficult, something vigorously supported by single mothers' groups. Given that a child is as much its father's as its mother's, it's no wonder fathers feel discriminated against in the family courts. And will continue to be until that principle is recognised.

However, both practically and as an ideal, marriage is no longer an option for many men. Even those who want to get married and stay that way can't find young women to marry them. Indeed many young women shy away from it because, as they admit themselves, they don't need men. The welfare state has become almost entirely feminised. Who needs marriage when you have the state? But of course children do need marriage, because they need their fathers.

So what is to be done? We need to concentrate on the real problem with Australian families and their children. The nub of which is not that children have any need of gay marriage (far from it), but that we need more fathers and mothers together in marriage.

A new report, called For Kid's Sake, will be launched by opposition families spokesman Kevin Andrews next Tuesday at Parliament House. In it, University of Sydney law professor Patrick Parkinson, who is widely involved in child protection and specialises in family law, shows the "alarming deterioration, over the past 10 years, in the social environment in which children and young people are growing up in Australia".

The evidence is the massive rise in reports of child abuse and neglect, the increase in the number of children in care, the deterioration in adolescent mental health, and the rise in risky behaviours, especially among teenage girls. To a large extent the report draws together existing research that is available, but buried in a range of different publications.

And it is the cumulative impact of all the data taken together that is so troubling. It points, in particular, to a rapidly worsening situation, especially for vulnerable teenage girls.

The major explanation for this is the increase in family conflict and family breakdown. Parkinson shows how in two generations the number of children whose parents are living apart by the time they are 15 has increased quite substantially. The report makes major recommendations for strengthening families through a range of initiatives, including relationship education in disadvantaged areas.

We can turn our minds to different solutions for this chaos, but the unrelenting drive for a complete and legal revolution in the nature of the family and especially the role of fathers, built on nothing but a campaign by a vociferous minority, is a recipe for social collapse. However, curiously, contrary to Greens MP Adam Bandt's expectations and to the surprise of many journalists, during this parliamentary sitting it has turned out that gay marriage is not as popular with the constituency as most campaigners had thought.

So perhaps it is time to call a halt to any more crazy attempts at social engineering and thought control disguised as "marriage equality". We might try facing the truth, and admit that the heart of our problems is non-marriage -- of the old-fashioned, mother-and-father kind.